Part One

1

Every great wealth creation in America has sprouted from the opening of a new frontier. Those who were the first to understand that virgin territory was beckoning just beyond the familiar borders, and who had the ability to act on that understanding, have always been rewarded to a degree that could never occur in an established economy. Sometimes this frontier has been geographic, as in the westward expansion. Sometimes it has been a technological frontier, as in the development of the Internet. In Florida, the frontier was old age.

There was a time before people retired. Instead, they just died. Eventually, we reached a point of relative security and material comfort such that the luckiest among us could enjoy a few years of rest between their productive years and death. And then this became widespread enough to have a name, “retirement.” However, the metropolises of the northeast were not ready for masses of graying citizens, who could no longer bear the crowded streets and subways, or the long winters, of their lifelong homes. Meanwhile, a thousand miles to the south, ambitious developers were conducting experiments in draining swampland and creating self-contained communities of seniors. They could see that it would soon not be enough simply to retire — we would need to retire to somewhere. Their experiments would result in the creation of Florida — and, indeed, the last third of the human lifespan — as we know it.  It is in Florida that my story begins. And, of course, that is where it will end.

~~~

When I started law school, I fully expected I would spend my career in Manhattan. This seemed inevitable after I landed an internship with a decent firm after my second year of school. However, it was during that same year that I met Hayley, and even as I was trying to secure a post-graduation offer and scanning apartment listings, there was simultaneously a new gravitational force in my life pulling me southward. Hayley was finishing her master’s in environmental studies and wanted to get as far away from upstate New York as possible, and continually pressed me to look for jobs in her hometown. And that July, while most of my classmates remained up north, I was sitting in a convention hotel in Miami, wearing three layers on account of the air conditioning, staring at the first page of the Florida bar exam.

After we got engaged, we went back to campus for a few days to pack up our student apartments and say goodbye to whoever we knew that was still there. It was now early September, and it felt jarring to be leaving as everyone else was arriving – we were no longer part of the cycles of the school year. Within a week, we had moved into a condo in West Palm Beach, part of a new mixed-use development, Renaissance Center, which was one piece of a grand plan to revitalize the long-decaying downtown. The name of our building was the Piazza, so called because it overlooked the main square around which the development radiated, with a fountain in the center that contributed to the faux-Mediterranean ambience that I was already starting to take for granted. In the first ring around the square were high-end clothing shops, two wine bars, and new outposts of four upscale national chain restaurants, with luxury apartments and condominiums in the upper floors. Beyond that row were the anchor stores and casual dining.  In the final orbit, massive parking structures formed a virtual barricade against the outlying neighborhoods. Beyond the zone of urban renewal were rows of old, brightly colored shacks that looked as if they might blow away with the next storm. You wouldn’t go out there at night. Hayley thought all of this felt contrived and wanted to live by the beach, but I pushed hard for Renaissance Center as the closest approximation of the urban living I had expected before she convinced me to move here, and eventually she conceded.

I had landed a position with Donovan & Woods LLP, whose real estate transactions group was considered one of the best in the region, on par with even the top Miami firms.  I had no interest in real estate, but it was the only area for which the Florida firms were all hiring, so I did my best to fake an enthusiasm for the myriad ways of holding title in property and the intricacies of land use regulations, and the hiring partners were suitably impressed. They put me to work immediately, as there were several large deals in the office, in particular a sale of a light industrial park in Riviera Beach, which implicated some obscure environmental ordinances. I was somewhat of a novelty to them as a rookie from an out-of-state school, and they seemed to enjoy having me research the most arcane subjects imaginable.

Hayley, after a few tense weeks of searching, found a job with the Center for the Protection of Florida’s Resources, a well-funded environmental non-profit. She was surprised by how mundane much of the work was — she spent much of a typical day on fundraising, calling from lists of past donors that had been divided into numeric categories ranging from one to five, in increasing order of how likely they were to make future donations. On her first day, they had her call an entire list of “ones” and she didn’t raise a dime. Both of us were dealing with the shock of going from analyzing policy and institutions from the Olympian perspective of academia, to slogging through reams of minutiae.

Our social life was almost non-existent at the beginning. Even though Hayley had grown up here, she hadn’t actually lived here in years, and most of her friends from high school had relocated somewhere in the northeast. We didn’t have much in the way of neighbors – our building was only partially occupied, and the units on either side of us were empty. We were both working late most of the time, trying to make a good first impression at our jobs, usually going down to one of the pizza places or the grocery in Renaissance Center to pick up one of the pre-made dinners. Even though it was a massive change to go from living on a campus, walking distance from any number of friends and casual acquaintances, to living in a half-empty condo in a town where we barely knew anybody, it didn’t make us unhappy. We were enjoying each other’s company, and this felt like enough.

One Saturday night Hayley’s parents invited us to dinner at Jerry’s Deli, their favorite restaurant in Palm Beach Gardens. Hayley’s father had a successful ophthalmology practice in that town, and they lived in a gated community called Windsor Pointe.  The line was out the door when we arrived, and Dr. and Mrs. Teitelbaum were standing at the back of it.

“So! You made it up from West Palm.” Dr. Teitelbaum called out to us.

“The line moves quickly,” Mrs. Teitelbaum reassured us, even though we hadn’t registered any concern. I felt I was at least a half hour away from being hungry anyway.

“I like that part of town where you’re living,” Dr. Teitelbaum continued. “It’s nice what they’re trying to do there. Revitalize the place. They’ve had a couple projects like that since I’ve lived here, maybe this one will take off.”

Was he mocking my idea to live downtown? I didn’t like the thought of having stepped into one in a series of failed renewal projects. It occurred to me that we might be overpaying for our condo. I felt the need to justify myself. “It’s been terrific so far. The other night, Hayley and I went to this great pan-Asian place down the street.” I realize what an ass I sounded like, using the term “pan-Asian” in a real-life conversation, but I wanted them to know that I had something that they didn’t. I assumed they had some dimly-lit Chinese take-out places within driving distance of their house, but I knew with certainty there was no restaurant in Palm Beach Gardens that had California rolls, General Tso’s chicken, and Pad Thai on the same menu.

Full disclosure: I did not actually like said pan-Asian restaurant. Hayley knew this, agreed that it was mediocre, and didn’t call me on it in front of her parents, and even volunteered how much she liked the pot stickers.

After twenty minutes, we had barely made it inside. And then I saw something that astounded me. A short man entered the restaurant. He was at least in his seventies, but unlike all of the other seniors in the restaurant, he looked sharp.  He was wearing a black button-down shirt (in contrast to the garish yellows, oranges and greens ahead of us in line) and dark gray trousers. No glasses, no cane, no hearing aid, and no comb-over — he was secure in his baldness. And then, moments later, in walked his companion, a striking woman, probably in her fifties, a slightly haughty expression on her face, tall, smart but not overdressed. They walked past the line, were greeted obsequiously by the server, and disappeared to somewhere in the back of the restaurant.

The rest of the group must have noticed my stunned silence. “That’s Morty Silverberg,” Mrs. Teitelbaum whispered. “He’s the man who built this town.”

]]> https://www.wildviolet.net/2018/04/22/a-country-for-old-men/feed/ 3 https://www.wildviolet.net/2017/07/19/the-red-panda/ https://www.wildviolet.net/2017/07/19/the-red-panda/#comments Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:05:25 +0000 http://www.wildviolet.net/?p=5324

I don’t breed well in captivity. This is a problem, because I live in a cage.

Although I enjoy telling other animals that I was born in the wild, the truth is that I’ve been in one cage or another for as long as I can remember. I have some very vague recollections of the wild that feel like a scene from a dream, everything was dark green and scary. But my first clear memories are of the zoo back in Nebraska where I had spent most of my life.

My current cage is the most frustrating one I’ve been in yet. The female they have me with, Shama, is not my type at all. I was talking about this with a koala in the next cage, who asked me what my type actually is. I told him I didn’t know, because I’ve only been in a few cages so far and haven’t figured it out yet.

Incidentally, Shama is very judgmental about the fact that I socialize with koalas and capybaras and other animals. She’s dismissive of virtually every other species in the zoo (except for elephants, whom she really puts on a pedestal for some reason). She’s particularly hostile to the “great” pandas, probably out of an inferiority complex, shared by pretty much every red panda I’ve ever met.  I’m probably not immune to it myself, and I have to say I do find black and white pandas (as we call them) to be pretty dull company. Koalas, though, are great fun to talk with. They sleep 20 hours a day, so they usually like to talk about their dreams. And they have some very weird dreams because of all of the eucalyptus.  I try to tell Shama about them, just to make conversation, but she’s completely uninterested, she tells me that koalas are lazy and leaves it at that. The ironic thing is that she considers me the provincial one, because I came from a zoo in the Midwest.

My failure to breed in captivity seems to be a lot more worrisome for the zookeepers than for myself. They fret about it endlessly. I get it – we’re an endangered species, our natural habitat is being destroyed, etc. But how can I be responsible for solving that problem? If our species is doomed to extinction, it’s not because one male didn’t copulate with one female that he happened not to be that attracted to. The older red pandas are even worse than the humans. They lounge around in the back of the cage, and only rouse themselves out of their senile haze to eat, or to harangue me about not producing offspring. Anyway, it wouldn’t hurt if Shama made a little more of an effort and didn’t just assume that I’d throw myself at her because we both happen to be red pandas.

In spite of all this, being an animal, I would have probably mated with Shama one of these days, sired a few cubs, and put myself in position to spend my twilight years guilt-tripping some poor sap in the front of the cage about not producing any offspring like I had. Except, one day, I uncharacteristically ate some rotten bamboo one of the zookeepers had left out for me. I don’t know why I did it; from the smell I could tell it was borderline edible at best, and I wasn’t even that hungry. Anyway, I came down with some awful indigestion, vomited all over the place (to the delight of a couple of younger human boys who had come to see me, and to the shock of their parents), and before I completely understood what was happening I was down at the infirmary.

The infirmaries at these high-class zoos have to be seen to be believed. The one back in Nebraska was a little dirty room with one overworked vet. Here, the cages are spacious and immaculate; veterinary staff comes by so often to check on you it almost makes you uncomfortable. The food is much better than anything you get in the regular cages. And, it gives you the opportunity to meet animals who you might never see otherwise. I happened to be one cage down from a mandrill named Sidney, who had some kind of infection he didn’t want to tell me about. We made small talk for a while, but when I mentioned the location of my cage, he suddenly became more interested.

“You mean the one just south of the koalas, and directly across from the capybaras?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Did you ever think about escaping?”  The obviousness of the question struck me. Despite all of the time I had spent complaining to myself about my situation, the answer was no. I had never really conceived of it as a possibility.

“Oh, all the time.”

“There’s a way out of that cage. Wait until a rainy night…” At that moment, one of the staff came in, and we all became silent. I was worried he was coming in to take Sidney, but he was just there to administer some injections to one of the hyenas, who screamed horribly. That night, Sidney revealed the escape plan to me completely.

~~~

Shama was asleep. I sat a few feet from her, under the same rock, watching the rain come down. Having been fed early evening before the storm, I was tempted to doze off, too, but I kept myself awake. Suddenly, it happened: one of the oldest bamboo shoots on the edge of the cage, under pressure of the wind and rain, tipped over just enough, so that it rest against the branch of an oak tree that hung just over the far wall. Now, there was a path out. When the rain let up a little, I scurried over to climb the bamboo shoot. God, it was slippery. The first time I started up, I fell almost immediately. I came back and dug my claws in harder this time, moving slowly and deliberately. My hand muscles strained, but I kept going. This was my only chance; no doubt, tomorrow, the maintenance crew would notice the fallen bamboo and cut it down. About halfway up, I looked back and saw the sleeping figures of Shama and the older pandas, not even aware of my escape. The idea of leaving them behind motivated me further. I kept inching my way up the shoot until the branch was in reach. I grabbed hold of it and pulled myself up. Exhausted, I rested on the branch, surveying the zoo for the first time from outside the cage.

Zoos are strange places at night. One of my vague memories of the wild is how noisy it was at night – all of the bugs, the bats, the other nocturnal animals made a racket; it was the daytime that was quiet, while everyone was trying to avoid drawing the attention of the predators. In a zoo it’s the opposite. Humans don’t want to watch animals sleep, so zoos tend not to keep many nocturnal animals. So, once the sun goes down and the visitors leave, things are very still. As I climbed down the tree, all I could hear was the sound of the rain.

After my conversation with Sidney, I had been so obsessed with the idea of climbing out of the cage that I hadn’t given that much thought to what I would do after I escaped. Sure, I had fantasized about living some particular life in the wild, but didn’t have any idea of how to get there. I decided I would go back to the mandrill for guidance. He had mentioned that his cage was in the north-east end of the zoo, directly opposite from where I was. That walk through the zoo was probably the eeriest experience of my life. Every animal was asleep in its cage, I was outside and completely alone.